Most
every battle begins with a pre-dawn attack. My personal war was no exception.

It is rare for an early morning
telephone call to bring good news. The ringing of my phone before the sun was
up on June 13, 2006, was a fine example. As my mind cleared from sleep, I
recognized the voice of my urologist, who made no apology for the hour. Quickly
calculating that he probably had time for phone calls only before rounds and
appointments, I figured his busy schedule as a doctor certainly trumped mine of
a retired soldier who writes military history.

I
had the highest respect for the physician whom I had been seeing since August
2003 when a bursting tumor in my right kidney called for the organ’s removal.
Despite my concerns about his apparent youth—I joked to Linda that he likely
only had office hours when he could get away from his high school study
hall—Ihad great confidence in his
abilities. He had proven his skills by removing the kidney through laparoscopy
that minimized the cutting on my body and had greatly reduced the recovery
time.

Although
the tumor proved cancerous, the doctor had said back in ’03 that the malignancy
was confined to the kidney and that he “had gotten all of it.” A month after
that operation, I was back traveling cross country to research books, attend
antique postcard and paper shows, visit friends, and see the sights.

More than twenty years in the army
had taken me around the world more than many times and had offered the
opportunity to live on or near the three coasts of the United States. I had
fought in Vietnam as an infantryman, jumped from airplanes with airborne units,
and participated as both a student and instructor in the army’s toughest
training at its Ranger School. I never considered myself to be a really tough
guy, but I was proud to note that I had spent much time in the company of men
who were.

So
a few cuts and stitches did not seem like all that big of a deal. My philosophy
was that if I had to lose a body part, it was best that it be one that comes in
pairs. That is not to say that I was not concerned, but it really seemed to be
more inconvenient than life-changing.

After
the kidney laparoscopy, the only long-range impact was an every-six-month CT
scan, x-ray, and blood work routine. This urologist had said these tests were
just precautionary, and either out of naivety, ignorance, or just a desire to
get on with life, I put kidney cancer behind me except for these bi-annual lab
visits. Each half year I would become a little concerned, but as each test
proved negative, the worry lessened. Just another minor inconvenience in a
busy, happy life.

Now this June morning the doctor was
saying something that barely penetrated my now alert mind, something about the
need for more tests because another read of the most recent film had revealed
what looked like a tumor on my right adrenal gland. This news was especially
surprising since I had had my
latest tests two weeks earlier and he had then said once again that everything
was okay.

By this time I was certainly awake
but still not all that concerned. My initial reaction was thinking, “Damn, I’m
going to loose six more weeks to recover from another operation.”

I
should have been a little more alarmed by the fact that the doctor had already
scheduled an MRI for me in addition to another CT and bone scans. I asked why a
MRI and he said it would give an even better picture than the CT.

All
of this I would have been shared with my wife Linda, who had been with me
through good and bad for more than three decades, as well as through the kidney
removal, but she was not home. She was chasing a dream more than a thousand
miles away.Having amassed a small
fortune in owning an antique and architectural salvage store and in rehabbing
and flipping residential property in Phoenix, Linda had spent most of the
previous year purchasing and furnishing Victorian houses for a vacation rentals
startup in Galveston, Texas. As in many cases, the true innovator is not the
one to profit from such ventures and her loans and bills were coming due. She
had other problems as well. Her 83-year-old father lay in a Lubbock hospital room
with heart problems. Linda had flown from Galveston the week before and raised
hell with the doctors on her dad’s behalf until he got the proper care. Now
that he was back home and recovering from surgery, she was planning to briefly
return to Phoenix to see me, our daughter, and grandchildren in just a few
days’ time.

My
appointment with the urologist would not be until several days after the new
tests.Linda would arrive shortly before
that appointment so it seemed best not to tell her until she got home. Between
the Galveston project and her father, she had worries enough.

I
picked Linda up at the airport and she caught me up on her news as we drove to
her store in the uptown section of the city. An hour or so later I took her out
into the desert-hot parking lot to share the sparse shade offered by a small
tree so we could have some privacy. There I told her my news about the latest
test results.I felt emotion rising
through my body as I spoke but attributed it to perhaps something going on in the
adrenal gland—an organ responsible for the flight or fight reaction, according
to my computer search.Linda, as usual,
was the calm, thoughtful person I had loved all these years. We decided we
would wait for the doctor’s appointment, now less than 36 hours away, and then
plan from there. Neither of us had a clue nor premonition of what lay before
us.

Life
went on. Linda met with her employees, played with the grandchildren, and
searched for web sites that I had already found and studied. She made no mention,
but I’m sure she also hated to lose six or more weeks when she was in the midst
of the greatest financial gamble of her—and our—life.

On
the morning of the 20th we made the short drive from our home to my
doctor’s building. After the normal wait of nearly an hour beyond our scheduled
appointment, a nurse called us into a typical bright, sterile examination room
where we waited another fifteen minutes or so. I passed the time playing a
mental game of survival. If forced to stay in this room for one year, just how
much food and reading material could I stockpile on which to survive. The
examination table would make a decent bed; there was running water. I was
trying to figure out what to do with waste when the doctor opened the door and
my concerns about survival took a completely different and unexpected turn.

He
still looked as youthful as ever, but he did not offer his usual smile or
friendly greeting. Instead he dragged a chair over so he that he sat facing us.
With his hands clasped in his lap, he began, “I have some bad news.” He did not
wait for a response but continued, “Your cancer has metastasized. You have
tumors on your right adrenal gland, in your lungs, lymph glands, and possibly
in the bone of your skull.”

All
my life, I have prided myself in my ability to remain calm under pressure. I
had forced myself to smile and laugh when “standing in the door” in a mass
parachute jump out of a screaming jet transport plane, had been able to take a
deep breath in the thick of combat to report calmly on the radio to higher
headquarters the estimated number of enemy in the Vietnam firefights, and had
stood stoic at the funerals of my parents.

Now
I fought back a choking feeling in my throat and a burning behind my eyes. I
swallowed hard, looked at Linda, and then turned to the doctor to ask, “What
does that mean?”

He
fidgeted. I wondered if he did not often deliver such news or if he feared I
would be angry that he had given me a “clean bill of health” only two weeks
earlier.Whatever his emotions, he
gathered himself and answered, “It means you have six to eighteen months to
live. There is a new medicine that may give you a few more months, but there is
nothing else we can do.”

He
said I needed a biopsy of the tumor in my chest as soon as possible. While he
was sure the adrenal tumor was malignant, he was unsure of the others—or so I
heard. He said, or maybe I just thought I heard, that there was nothing else he
could do.I needed to go to an
oncologist, a cancer doctor.

I
then asked a question that I would put to a series of doctors over the next
months: “How will I die?” He said something about more tumors and growth. He
was not clear, but then I was not really hearing all that well. He soon
concluded, “We will make you as comfortable as possible.”

The
doctor, who seemed extremely anxious to get back to patients who had more than
eighteen months to live, explained that his nurse would provide me the
information on the oncologist I should see next. After several minutes of her
searching through various files and papers, she found a name and phone number
which she scratched down on one of those pads of note paper that the
pharmaceutical companies provide doctor’s offices as free advertising. We were
shown the door with no further comment.

Linda
and I rode the elevator down in silence. We had arrived early enough that the
desert heat had not yet risen, but it was now nearly noon and our car was so
hot we could barely sit on the seats. Linda slipped under the wheel and started
the engine and air conditioner.We sat
silent for a few minutes before I asked, “What did you hear him say?”

We
stayed in the parking lot for the next quarter of an hour, going back and
forth, re-creating the doctor’s comments. We differed some in our remembering
the details, but “six to eighteen months” had come out loud and clear to us
both.

Linda
did not cry. I saw the concern, frustration, and even fear in her eyes, but
she, as usual, looked for action rather than reaction. Her mind was already
working on finding information, searching for answers, and coming up with a
plan. My mind was calculating: three months to my 60th birthday, so
I should make that easily. Thanksgiving and Christmas were a little more than
half a year away so maybe. Anything beyond New Year’s 2007 was iffy at best.

I
insisted we tell only those closest to us, at least for the present. The old
phrase of “getting your affairs in order” came to the forefront. My will was
badly out of date. I hadhand-written
one in the back of my journal after a particularly vicious firefight in Vietnam
nearly forty years earlier and then had the military lawyer draw up a basic
legal document a year later.

CHAPTER
2

JUNE
2006

Linda

With
those words—“You have cancer”—our
world changed forever. The words were completely unbelievable and absolutely
unacceptable—and nowhere did they have a place in our lives. The road Lee and I
had been traveling during our thirty-eight years together had suddenly
disappeared from beneath our feet and we were free-falling before we realized
we’d stepped past the cliff’s edge. We had no idea when we walked into the
urologist’s office that June afternoon that we were departing
“life-as-we-knew-it.” When we emerged an hour later, we were in another
universe where everything looked the same but nothing was, where everything
that we had thought was important wasn’t, where everything we had planned to do
we now weren’t. Nothing was familiar, no landmarks existed, and no maps showed
us how to navigate this foreign landscape called cancer.

Were
we different from any other people who hear those words, “You’ve got cancer”? Probably not. The mind short-circuits when
confronted with devastating facts it does not want to hear. At least mine does.
That day it crackled with denial:He can’t have said cancer. Lee doesn’t have cancer!It’s a mistake. The doctor’s reading the
films wrong. Wait!

I
turned to look at Lee as the urologist delivered the news. It was absurd that
he would have cancer. He looked perfectly healthy. Well, okay, maybe his six-foot-four
frame was a few pounds over his ideal weight at the age of 59, but he did not
appear unhealthy.Not dying.He did not look like someone who would be
dead in six months. His olive skin bequeathed by an Italian-heritage mother
showed few wrinkles, his gray eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses were bright,
his very essence was a powerful life force. My frantic mind would not, could
not, square what I was seeing with what I was hearing.

I
remember seeing the doctor’s lips continue to move. I knew I must listen but I
was as deaf to his syllables as if a canon had exploded in my ear. Honestly, I
could not hear more—not above my internal cacophony of wild denials from every
corner of my mind that this could not, must not be real.

But,
of course, the diagnosis was real for Lee as it is for thousands—indeed
millions—of people every year. And it doesn’t matter what part body modifies
the disease—breast cancer, liver cancer, skin cancer, colon
cancer—the reaction to the label is the same: stark terror.

In
Lee’s case, the disease presented itself in the form of kidney cancer—a much
rarer and more cure-resistant form than many malignancies. Only three percent
of diagnosed cancers are kidney cancer, a.k.a.,
renal cell carcinoma. While everyone wants to be special, this was not the way
to achieve notoriety. But there we were in the summer of 2006, totally
unprepared for this killer, not knowing what to do or how to react.

I
write in terms of “we,”“our,” “us”—the
plural pronouns—because this happened to both of us, not the same way and not
equally. I do not presume to comprehend what the experience is truly like for
Lee; only one who has actually been in those shoes can know how it feels. Even
so, cancer does not strike in the singular. What affected him affected me. His
disease changed everything for us both—and thus my inclusion as a party to this
ordeal for which we were so wholly unprepared.

Heretofore,
Lee had rarely been sick a day in his life. He had no chronic health
conditions; he took no medication, he didn’t even have but a couple of
cavities. The only medical event that had ever happened to him had been almost
three years earlier when he had had his right kidney removed after it ruptured.
Yes, the tumor had been malignant, and, yes, this should have been our warning
signal, but the surgeon—this very same urologist—had assured us that he had
“gotten it all.” Because we had full confidence in this Harvard-graduate
specialist and because all of our concern had been focused on the surgery
itself that ended so successfully, we went merrily on with our lives. I cannot
explain how we could have been so unprepared, but we were—totally. The size of
our States of Denial not only qualified for a zip code but also a seat at the
U. N.

In all fairness to us, though, two
factors played strongly into our being so blindsided.First, Lee had just gotten a clean bill of
health. In fact, the doctor had told him that after one more 6-month test was
clear he could go to annual exams.The
second contributor to our ignorant bliss was the fact that no one had warned us
after the nephrectomy in 2003 that in fifty percent of the cases like Lee’s,
cancer returns. In neglecting to mention that fact, the young surgeon had left
us vulnerable to this possibility—but he had also inadvertently done us a
gigantic favor. While we would have been better prepared—one can’t ever really
be prepared—had we known this statistic, we would also have lived the
intervening years under a cloud of dread. This perspective, however, was one of
hindsight. That was not how we viewed the situation that fateful day.

Like zombies, we left the doctor’s
office and then sat numbly in the idling car in the parking lot under the
blazing desert sun, the air conditioning struggling against the central Phoenix
heat as we grappled for equilibrium. A few long seconds ticked by and then Lee
asked, “What did you hear him say?” I repeated what I could unscramble from my
memory: tumors in adrenal gland, lungs, and lymph node. Lee hadn’t heard the
lung part—his own version of selective hearing—but he thought he had heard
“brain.” I distinctly remembered “skull.” Big difference but each part was
overwhelmed by the sum of the whole.

We
were literally in shock. We were without emotion—just fumbling to collect our
mental facilities to absorb what the doctor had told us. Despite the internal
chaos, we had both heard him say that kidney cancer is incurable once it has
spread, that chemotherapy and radiation weren’t options because they don’t kill
renal cell carcinoma, and that there are some new drugs just approved by the
FDA that can sometimes prolong life by six months or so.

We
stayed in the parking lot, each asking the other the inevitable and
unfathomable questions,

What does he mean,” incurable”? . . .

What did he say about
chemo?Why won’t it work?

Did he say I’ve
got lung cancer?

He did say
cancer, right?

Did you
understand about those new drugs?

What does he
mean, six to eighteen months?That can’t
be right.

I’ve got brain
cancer, too?And adrenal cancer, too?What the hell?

By
the time I put the car in gear, it was painfully apparent that neither of us
knew the first thing about cancer. Equally obviously, we had to learn
everything we could as fast as possible. Lee’s life was a stake.

We raced home to our computers and
the Internet without even being aware of the 3rd Street traffic, the
high-rise office buildings we passed, or our own quiet residential area tucked
into the city between uptown and downtown. Once a northern border of the city
and an upscale subdivision of the 1920s, our Los Olivos district retained its
charm with revival-style houses—ours was French Revival with a gorgeously steep
hipped roof—large three-quarter-acre lots, and palm and olive trees planted all
those years ago by the developer William Heard of the Heard Museum fame.
Between the street and sidewalk each house had either palms that reached for
the sky or silver-leafed olives with trunks contorted by the desert into
individual works of art. Ours was one of the most spectacular streets in
Phoenix, but we noticed none of its beauty that day as I turned into our drive
and parked in back of the house. Indeed I am not even sure how we got there.

One
of the things I realized on our drive home was that we had to tell our adult
daughters Reveilee and Meridith immediately. However, I wanted to have at least
a passing acquaintance with some hard facts about kidney cancer before we
talked to them.I did not want them to
experience the dearth of information we had just encountered when they heard
the terrible update on their father. I attacked the research with fervor, but
the more I learned, the more I dreaded telling them.

Our
37-year-old daughter Reveilee lived less than a mile across town with her three
small children. Divorced now, she had her hands full caring for those babies
and managing the household while working part-time. Our 34-year-old daughter
Meridith lived in Los Angeles still recovering from her last relapse of the
Multiple Sclerosis disease she had suffered for the past nine years.

Because
we saw Reveilee and our grandchildren almost daily, we could not withhold the
news from her for more than a day. We were sitting at the kitchen watching the
kids play outside when Lee told her about the cancer diagnosis. She reacted
with her typical stoicism, which I knew to be denial. She simply refused to
believe that her father was dying and, therefore, she did not need to
emotionally deal with the news.

We delayed telling Meridith as long as we
could, in part because making the announcement was so hard and because we knew
she would be devastated—and show it, unlike her sister. Finally, on Sunday
evening Lee and I got on the house phones and made the call. In telling her,
Lee was unemotional, factual, and calm. He assured her that many people have
cancer and that we were going to do everything we could. She took the news
cautiously, curtailing her questions and reactions. Years later she would ask
if we had realized that we were telling her this on Father’s Day.

Within an hour Meridith called me
back in a state of alarm. She had, of course, gone straight to her computer and
found the same information we had. Now she wanted answers and more information
in earnest. She could hardly control the hysteria that threatened to overtake
her.

Synopsis"At War With Cancer: One Couple's Strategic Battles for Survival Using Both Traditional and Alternative Treatments" Bolivar Roads

When diagnosed with Stage IV kidney cancer, LTC (Ret) Michael Lee Lanning faced a new and fearsome enemy that the doctors said would kill him in 6-18 months. Instead of accepting this as his fate, Lanning, with the help of his wife Linda, pursued strategies--both conventional and alternative--to battle his disease and fight for his life. This book tracks the Lannings' war with cancer from diagnosis to survival, from exploring traditional treatments at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center to transitioning to a raw vegan lifestyle learned at Hippocrates Health Institute, from enduring the depths of despair to embracing the heights of hope. Their experiences and insights shared here is the information they sought for themselves when Lanning was first diagnosed.

Texas Association of Authors?is the only organization in Texas whose focus is to promote the authors within the great state of Texas itself. Texas Authors leverages the knowledge and expertise of many different authors to help promote others within the world of reading and writing.